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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23607121">THE REFLECTIONS OF ANTON SOKOLOV</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlatHead/pseuds/PlatHead'>PlatHead</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dishonored (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Early Days, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 15:14:32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,266</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23607121</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlatHead/pseuds/PlatHead</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Retired to his home country of Tyvia, Anton Sokolov reflects on a long life and begins to write his memoirs.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. An Introduction and Statement of Purpose</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p>In the duration of what must be declared, by even my staunchest opponent, an exceptional career, I have written precisely four texts which have been deemed either <em> auto </em> or <em> semiauto </em> biographical <em> . </em> In a forest whose trees are some hundreds of scholarly texts, thousands of petitions for funding and brief monographs regarding the future of the philosophies, and several brief forays into what have been called “speculative” of theoretical fiction, there are but <em> four </em>whose subject or subjects include my own, esteemed life.</p>
<p>Two are travel narratives--my brief treatise <em> On Travel to Pandyssia </em> and my first true reflection, <em> On Pandyssia. </em> The latter is by far the more magnificent text than the first, but in either case they have more to do with that famous land to which the poets have dubbed “All-Evil” ( <em> Pan-Dys </em>) than the broad circumstances of the life I have lived.</p>
<p>The third, my <em> Dialogues </em>, features both conversations and debates which took place in my lecture theatre over the time of my tenure at the Academy, quotations drawn directly from my remarks to some of Dunwalls finest young artists, and finally brief excerpts of my greatest achievement-in-discourse, the theoretical musings behind the Sokolov-Joplin Elixir which drove the Plague of the Pandyssian Bull Rat, if you’ll forgive the joke, weeping from the Isles.</p>
<p>Three works I have listed, three which fail to fully recall the remarkable events of my now irritatingly long life. But! The wise reader will detect that I promised four, and so now we must turn to the unfortunate worlds of libel and scandal.</p>
<p>Much has been made of alleged similarities between certain sequences in my opera, <em> The Curse of the Wise </em>, and incidents in my own life, particularly the lyric driving-out of Pietro Jack and the once-rivalry with my esteemed former cousin Piero Joplin.</p>
<p>I will state again, as I have stated before: <em> Curse of the Wise </em> is a work of fiction, fully divorced from the experience of the artist. HOWEVER, the mind of the creative is a machine beyond the understanding of even the greatest neurophilosphers (a statement I make with my own credentials in the field in mind). It is, therefore, POSSIBLE TO SOME DEGREE, that I drew in some degree upon the events of my own, illustrious life in constructing the narrative of <em> Curse </em>. Perhaps, in this, I erred -- but if I did it was only in the pursuit of artistic truth!</p>
<p>And now we have come, at last, to my true topic: An illustrious career! My magnificent life! In <em> none </em> of these texts, autobiographical or not, have I emphasized my own tale, the connective tissue of a life which led me to live and teach, for some time, on each of the major islands of the known world -- save Morley. In this text, therefore, for the very first time, I will show the world to which I was privy as I painted, wrote, and above all else <em> thought </em> my way through the mightiest halls of power and the lowest dens of iniquity from my birth on 12 Seeds 1786 to today, 12 Seeds 1856. Today, I am seventy in a very different world than that into which I was born. Today, I begin work on my magnum opus, my great memoir, cautiously titled: <em> THE RECOLLECTIONS OF ANTON SOKOLOV, SCHOLAR, ARTIST, PHILOSOPHER: ON THE EVENTS OF A LONG CAREER AND MAGNIFICENT LIFE.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>--<em>Anton Sokolov, NP, MP, HANP, RP, Explorer of Pandyssia, </em></p>
<p>
  <em>  12 of Seeds, 1786</em>
</p>
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<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Considerations on the Nature of Artistic Birth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Anton Sokolov reflects on his genesis as an artist.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>My birth. My birth! When was I born? Who can say at what point the seed of the artist and the inventor enters the world? Perhaps, once, I might have said that artist is born with the body, and believed that. No longer. It was no innate nature of my own which drove me to innovate, to revolutionize the many fields in which I have worked. No, the circumstances into which I was driven -- driven by accident and driven by will -- did more to guide my brush and my pen than any inborn trait.<br/>
But this, you will understand, was not my perspective at the time. From the earliest days in Dabokva, I believed myself to be destined for greatness. These were days, you must understand, before the Judges. Tyvia was a backwater then, an Empire-Would-Be, fourth-fiddle in the politics of the Isles. I knew -- or thought I knew, though in truth I knew little -- that I was meant for more. </p><p>I was fourteen when I left Tyvia. There was nothing there for me, nothing for a child of my intellect, or so I thought -- and those were dangerous times. Change was in the air. For the first time in nearly two hundred years, the power of Gristol was challenged. The Morleyans had revolted, had killed the Empress -- but the killing of an Empress is nothing, now. Few enough are those who have not seen an Empress die, but in those days -- it was remarkable.<br/>
Of course, there was never really much hope for the Insurrection. Not once the Princes of Tyvia mobilized their navy, conscripting where they could not recruit. Five brothers of mine were drafted into that navy, and one alone returned to Dabokva.<br/>
But I was too young, though not too young to watch my mother starve in effort to feed me and my sister. Not to young to see the world as it really was, and to rejoice -- albeit from afar -- when the Princes were cast down.<br/>
But it was into this world of possibility, in the midst of the Insurrection, that I set out. I abandoned what remained of my family in Tyvia quite coldly, perhaps -- but then, I was always a cold youth. Perhaps I am still cold now, in my age. But my brothers were dying in the war and I had no interest in being conscripted myself with the coming of my majority. And there was more, of course. There was a woman, and there was another man -- though in reflection now they seem little more than children. There was a duel. I was lucky.<br/>
I do not know if she still lives. I did not love her, and did not see her again once he was dead. I was jealous, I think, that anyone should have a share in my closest friend of youth. And so no-one could.<br/>
I was a cold child.</p><p>The ship left Dabovka just days before my fifteenth birthday, and I upon it. I had little more than the skin on my back and my notebook, the first of many, and a charm of carved from a bear's tooth. It is sitting on my desk now, as I write. It was a gift, and eventually a curse.<br/>
The crossing has faded altogether from my memory, overruled by what came after. Dunwall -- city of possibility, or so I thought. City of filth would be more likely. City of silver dishes and lead pipes. The war was over. The two brothers who remained were winding their way back home, and I had fled Tyvia for next to nothing.<br/>
Well, almost next to nothing. I was fifteen, and in the city where I would make my fame.<br/>
So I ask, reader -- when was the seed of my art, of my invention, planted? In the serf-hovels of Dabokva, where I was born? On the docks of that city, standing over the ruin of the man who I loved? Or on the ship, in the Harbor district, in the Tyvian ghettos of Dunwall? Where was I born?<br/>
It was in Dunwall, I think, that I became an artist. Not through my struggle, but despite it.</p>
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